I venture to differ from his opinion on one point only, and that is that probably the silken or gold thread was not the one worked backwards and forwards through the stuff, since the flax thread from behind would do the work just as well. The gold or silk would thus be saved from friction, and would not need to be cut into needlefuls and threaded in a needle, but could be used from continuously, as I have before suggested for long lines of couching; it is, in fact, precisely the same thing, with the exception of taking the ‘working’ needle back through the hole it made, instead of at a little distance from it. This method is so often used in fine gold-work for turning at the end of a row when one does not want it to appear on the surface that I fancy it would be suggested by this.
[Illustration: Italian Early Sixteenth Century
_V. & A. Museum, South Kensington (No. 8388—1863)._
(_Suggested as Centre for Frontal, Fig. I._)]
The question of liturgical colours need not be very fully discussed here, as this is pre-eminently a practical manual and not a treatise on ritual. Although the embroidress naturally studies the reason and uses of the things she makes, it does not properly rest with her whether the ‘Use of Sarum’ or that of any other special diocese be followed. There certainly seems to have been no very hard and fast rule observed in this matter in the early ages of the Church or even in medieval times. From the old inventories we gather that altar-frontals and vestments existed of almost every known colour and shade (and some indeed _unknown_ ones, to us at least!). This of course may be to some extent accounted for by the votive offerings so frequently made by kings and nobles of their own magnificent vestments and of spoils taken in war.[7] These would be accepted and used in the Church quite irrespective of colour and design.
We might conclude from the old English illuminations that red, blue, purple, white, and gold were the colours most generally used, or considered most ideally correct; but on more careful investigation I think we should be driven to the conclusion that while the careful miniaturist drew the _forms_ of what he was accustomed to see in the ordinary services of the Church, he coloured them according to his own ideas of beauty or according to the limitations of his palette. A row of clergy in one illumination, for instance, would have their albes alternately blue and red; and I remember another of an outdoor procession in which the same arrangement prevailed, with the priests’ stoles coloured blue over the red albes and red over the blue ones.